A "Blood" Countess in Transylvania

Dracula has a distant relative... rather his right hand man had a distant relative who would be better described of as a "real" Dracula.

Her name was Elizabeth Bathory and she was a Hungarian noblewoman who married and then lived in Transylvania.  Her claim to fame was not whom she married (in fact according to most accounts in terms of nobility she married below her rank)  but what happened after her husband died.



The castle now lies in ruins, and is in a protected park, but its history, no matter how peaceful it looks is also bloody.  Bathory killed young girls, mostly village girls, but the number of girls and young women she killed is as high as 600.  Most of these girls were tortured before being killed, and this can only be described as a shameful part of Transylvania's history.  She was stopped only when she started to kill young women and girls of the lower nobility.

Due to these crimes, and as a Hungarian noblewoman with links to Hungarian royalty, as punishment for her crimes she was walled up inside a room of this castle.  There she died four years later.  While Vlad Tepes was indeed a warlord, she would fit the link to Dracula far better than him.

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